Wednesday, 9 July 2008

Great Moments In The History Of Sleep

So, I'm a shithouse sleeper. Nothing for you to be concerned about (or is it ladies? Rowr! Oh god, now I've made myself ill..), but a prick of a way to live your life. Sure I can sleep - if it's in a bed, everything is quiet, the temperature is right and I can turn my hyperactive mind off for ten minutes but it's when things don't work like this that the fun and games begin. A barking dog? Nervous breakdown territory. Car alarms? Welcome to suicide watch. The ticking crossing signal right outside my bedroom window when I lived in St. Kilda? You may remember that I went outside and tried to smash that one glorious summer morning in early 2004.

So, if the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars I can usually sleep - but god knows what goes on when I do because apparently it's like a fun house attraction full of wild scenes. Look, he's having hardcore nightmares! Not that I can remember them. See Adam start yelling things out in French even though he hasn't learnt squat since Year 8! Oh, he's plummetted out of bed onto the floor like a failed It's A Knockout contestant. It's all the fun of the fair in my bedroom for all the wrong reasons.

Then waking up is another thing. For the first half an hour I'm a mess of the highest order - like a Zombie half summoned from beyond the grave. And so it was that last night I ended up at a sleep disorder clinic with more wires and attachments on me than Robocop. Tubes up the nose, ECG's running riot, finger pulse things going nuts and a video camera watching events unfold live. So, as the fussiest sleeper in history do you think there was any danger whatsoever that I would be able to get enough sleep under those conditions to give any sort of meaningful data. Well, you'd be surprised but it was a close run thing. Thanks to the referring doctor who told me that it was ok if you freaked out because they've got mountains of sleeping pills that they can dish out to put you into a coma. Thanks for freaking nothing because when I woke up and asked for them to, as the kids say "Give me all your drugs you bastards", it turned out that they couldn't give you squat unless the specialist recommended it. What a farce. Somehow, despite all this and having more electrodes attached to my scalp than Ted Bundy in the electric chair I got away with it.

They finally let me go at 6 this morning, and what a hillarious drive that was home - half out of it, in hardcore fog and with a truckload of goo in my hair either from where the wires had been attached or where the night nurse dude had gotten a bit bored at 4am. What a shambles.